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Dave Taylor's May 2014 Work the Shell Column

Glad to know you’re reading my columns, Torben! Truth be told, I
develop on a variety of platforms, not just Linux, so while what you
say might well be true, it’s not true across all *nix systems. For
example, on my Mac OS X system:

Disappointing. It’s like the 1980s all over again. Now where’s my
polyester? — DaveT

I always read Dave Taylor's Work the Shell column end-to-end, despite
being an old hand at scripting and what-not. It is always possible to
learn
from other people, no matter how many years you have in the business.

In the May 2014 column, Dave mentions that bash does not understand the
-n option for the built-in echo command, which I find strange, as it
works fine for me (and has worked as far back as I can remember —
which makes it at least a couple of days ago).

I do recollect fondly of the days of yore when we had to keep track of
two distinct flavours of echo: the BSD version where you told echo to
hold its breath (i.e., no newline at the end) with a -n option (like
echo -n "Hold your breath") and the Sys V version where you whispered
at the end of the sentence for it to hold its breath with \c (like
echo "Hold your breath\c"). bash still holds the capability to
understand the Sys V behaviour with the -e option (like echo -e "Hold
your breath\c"), just to make life more exciting.

But, to make a long story a little longer: To the best of my
knowledge, the -n option should work more or less everywhere in Linux,
including with the bash built-in version of echo.

Best regards

Torben

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